WITHOUT (Mark Jackson)
Mark Jackson’s feature debut starts slow, with a 19 year old girl (Joslyn Jensen) arriving at a remote home with no cellphone reception and no internet access to look after the wheelchair bound and mute Grandfather of a family who are going on a two week holiday. As time passes Joslyn begins to neglect her duties and starts behaving quite strangely. At the same time Joslyn begins to believe that the man she is charged with looking after is less helpless than he seems. What’s going on? That would be telling.
Even as late as its penultimate day, LFF continues to throw up surprises, and this US indie with an increasingly dark and disturbing tone and an austere and formal visual style recalling Michael Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos proves to be one of the best. Quite a bit of the running time (which is brief) is spent building an atmosphere; isolating Joslyn in the house, establishing that even to begin with she doesn’t like her job and the many rules it comes with, but as the film unfolds it becomes clear that there is something Joslyn is holding in (about a girl who used to be her lover), and that there might be disturbing things happening either in the house or in Joslyn’s head.
By turns conjuring the same sort of weirdly tense atmosphere as a Dogtooth and proving unexpectedly moving (as when Joslyn records herself singing a T Pain song with just a ukulele as accompaniment), Without manages to keep you happily in the dark for much of its running time. Joslyn is often the only person on screen, certainly she’s the only one with much dialogue, and much of the growing tension happens because of the subtle way that Jensen’s performance darkens scene by scene, taking us with her into whatever abyss she’s falling in. This is her first feature, but with a combination of girl next door cuteness and a fearless calling card performance like this, Jensen should go far.
Is the revelation really a big surprise? No, but honestly I didn’t much mind, because the film is not about what happened (nor, refreshingly, is it about the fact that Joslyn is gay or bisexual) so much as it is about the slow effect it has on Joslyn and the consequences of that (beautifully illustrated in the film’s last scene). I really hope someone picks this up, it’s smart, distinctive and announces two interesting talents in director Jackson and Jensen.
4.5 / 5
THE DISH AND THE SPOON (Alison Bagnall)
I said in my Damsels in Distress review (a rave I won’t be repeating here) that Greta Gerwig can go either way for me. Well, I may have to change my tune on that, because she is easily the best thing about The Dish and the Spoon, which is otherwise only a sporadic success and suffers from a hobblingly wooden performance from her co-star.
Gerwig’s Rose has just left her husband after he has had an affair, and is aiming to track down and confront the woman involved. Before she can she encounters an unnamed English teenager (Olly Alexander), the two begin travelling together, spending time together, and bonding. Your reaction the The Dish and the Spoon will be based on your tolerance of the lead performances, and for me it was a straight 50/50 split in that respect. Gerwig is often wonderful; restrained for the most part but explosive when she needs to be and always affectingly real. She’s espcially good when Rose is one the phone to her Husband, once asking him to describe what he did with the other woman; the reaction on her face telling a devastating story. Alexander, on the other hand, has always bothered me; his monotonous voice and his patently false delivery of lines (even, in this case, ones he’s improvising) have always prevented me from connecting with his characters.
Ultimately, though there are funny and dramatically satisfying sequences here, the problem is one of chemistry. I don’t buy into Rose’s attraction to this dull kid, particularly not at this moment in her life. That’s a shame, because if you felt it then the film’s ending would have so much more punch, so much more meaning. As it is, for me, The Dish and the Spoon amounted to a few good showcases for Greta Gerwig, but not to a film I could get lost in.
2 / 5
